LastPass 2.0 Premium

Getting something for nothing is great, but getting a lot for hardly anything is also pretty darn good. LastPass 2.0 Premium ($12 per year) costs less than a martini at a Manhattan bar. It offers all the amazing password management features of the free version of LastPass plus impressive additions to mobile security and multifactor authentication.

Shared Features
Do read my review of LastPass 2.0 (free, 5 stars) for full details on this program's amazing capabilities. It does virtually everything that any of its competitors can do, and then goes further, much further. I'll summarize here, briefly.

Naturally LastPass handles capturing and playing back website login credentials. It's also very good at detecting password changes and new secure site signups. Its user interaction is very unobtrusive, and it successfully captures credentials from oddball login pages that throw the competition for a loop.

LastPass can store one or more profiles of personal information and one or more credit cards. When you go to fill a Web form you can mix and match, choosing whichever profile and whichever credit card you like. The identities feature lets you filter which passwords and profiles are visible, so, for example, you can enable a subset of your data at work.

Your encrypted data is stored online, so you can access it from any connected computer. In addition to passwords and personal data, LastPass will store secure notes. These can be formatted for specific data types such as driver's licenses and passports, and now can include attachments. Users of the free edition can store 50MB of files; upgrading to premium raises that to 1GB.

The free edition includes several varieties of multifactor authentication, to secure your LastPass data more strongly than even a strong password can. It also includes free credit monitoring.

Full Functionality with No Plug-in
It's true that you can log into your LastPass Vault from any connected computer, but if you don't have the LastPass plugin installed it can't automatically fill your saved logins or capture new ones. The free edition offers bookmarklets for this situatoin, tiny JavaScript programs contained in a URL, but some may find using them a bit awkward.

Enter IEAnywhere, a premium-only feature that lets you use LastPass without installing a plugin. Once you download and run the program you'll find a LastPass icon in the system tray. Click it to log in. You now have a full LastPass menu, including your tree of saved logins, that's rooted at the system tray instead of in a browser button.

IEAnywhere also puts a tiny icon in one corner of the Internet Explorer window. From this icon's menu you can choose to fill in passwords or Web forms, generate secure passwords, and more. It's a nice solution for occasions when you want to use LastPass but don't have the permissions needed to actually install the plug-in.

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